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Simulations of open ballistic quantum systems and semiclassical semiconductor superlattices

Abstract

The tunable antenna-coupled intersubband terahertz (TACIT) sensor is a heterodyne mixer based on the coupling of intersubband absorption with the sheet resistivity of doped GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells. A theoretical treatment of this device as an open quantum system operating at the ballistic limit leads to the development of perfectly matched layers for the position-space Liouville-von Neumann equation.

Meanwhile, the nonlinear dynamics of weakly-coupled, doped GaAs/AlGaAs superlattices in the sequential-tunneling regime are theoretically characterized by computing the Poincar e map of a self-consistent, semiclassical resonant tunneling model. Applied to shorter superlattices at higher bias voltages, period-doubling cascades to high-frequency chaos are observed, and their robustness to variations in the design parameters is explored.

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